We’re a public talking shop on housing and homelessness. We like drinking tea, making new friends and talking to strangers about housing. We’re trying to get as many people as possible, especially those without a permanent home, involved in the decisions that are being made about how we house people in Oxford.

We’re entering our final two-months at Open House and we’re in need of some more volunteers to keep the energy going until we close our doors on the 26th October. We’ve lost a few volunteers to the transience of Oxford recently and we’re in need of some sparky new faces to make the final period as great as possible. We’re on the hunt for friendly, kind and reliable people to volunteer as hosts for

We’re launching ‘Oxford is My Home’ a community-made magazine to tell the hidden stories of housing & homelessness in Oxford. The magazine represents a collaboration between Open House, and the Oxford Poetry Library and is supported by Lankelly Chase. Together, we’ve worked with individuals in Oxford to create a series of poems, stories, illustrations, collages, recorded conversations and journalistic articles which explore what it means to call Oxford ‘home’. Readers of Issue One will

The Open House team of wonderful volunteers are taking a well-earned Summer holiday. We’ll be closed for August but will be back in September for a bumper month of events. The last few months have seen visits from the likes of Guy Shrubsole, Charlie Luxton, Maff Potts, Annelise Dodds MP, Vijay Prashad, Asad Rehman, James Meadway, Pat McArdle and Cat Hobbs. We’ve talked about public land ownership, sustainable architecture, housing & a ‘green new

Lucille is part of a group of concerned Oxford renters who are working to establish a tenants union to make renting in the city fairer, more secure and more affordable. In the no man’s land of tenants’ rights, Oxford is a city of great power and inequality, where ⅔ of the population is renting. The influx of wealthy students, high paid university staff and transient nature of this population has exacerbated people’s powerlessness. Oxford

Transition by Design, the architecture and design cooperative behind Open House have written about the ideas behind Open House. In this Medium post they ask weather by creating a space that is actively welcoming to people without a permanent home and including them in the conversations that are being had about housing in the city, can we encourage a movement to create a fairer housing system that has a lived experience of homelessness in

Do you have an idea for building relationships and connecting people with place that could do with a £1000 cash injection? As part of this year’s Marmalade, Transition by Design and Lankelly Chase are running a live experiment in participatory grant making. Both Transition by Design and Lankelly Chase believe that more often then not, it’s communities who know best what they need. We’re experimenting with how to hand over control of funding to

Ten weeks, thirty-four volunteers, twenty-two events and several thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles in, we are delighted to say that Open House is open and thriving. Our public living room is open Wednesday to Saturday 10-5 and is welcoming people from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences from across Oxford to drink tea, make new friends and talk to strangers about housing. On top of this, our ‘Housing Matters’ series of talks have welcomed an incredible range of thinkers, doers

Thanks to an incredible group of volunteers, we’re delighted to say that we can keep our usual opening hours over the Christmas break. Open House will be open Wednesday to Saturday, 10am – 5pm throughout December and into January. If you need a bit of a break at any point, come and join us. We’re a home away from home, a free space, open to everyone and anyone. We’ve got tea, biscuits, puzzles, board